Social Norms and Language Policy?

Proposed Panel on Anthropological and Linguistic Perspectives
on Social Norming and National Language Policies

• Ideology Theory and/or Standard-Language Theory: these theories predict that state-sponsored ideologies are the only powerful belief systems in effect, and that they are hegemonic and oppressive.

• Social Norming? Another way of looking at the effect of law and other hegemonic forces in society and their influence on language, is the focus on social norms now being researched in disciplines such as psychology, political science, jurisprudence, criminology etc. That is, are there social forces, or adherence to social norms that condition social action/behavior, such that the rule of law can be disregarded as the motivating force.

  In the field of jurisprudence, until quite recently, legal studies concerned with language issues were concerned with case law, such as Supreme Court cases like Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) or Lau v. Nichols. Most legal scholarship in this country did not place the study of language and the law above any other kind of discriminatory practice.

  Recently, legal scholarship has developed a focus on the notion of social norms and how concern with or observation of social norms operates to condition certain kinds of behavior, irrespective of laws or of the presence of legal authority. As Posner ( Law and Social Norms Harvard U. Press, 2000 puts it,

  ``Most people refrain most of the time from anti-social behavior even when the law is absent or has no force. They conform to social norms." (Posner 2000:5)

  Posner also defines social norms as ``non-legal mechanisms of cooperation."

  ``Social Norms describe the behavioral regularities that occur in equilibrium when people use signals to show that they belong to the good type. Social Norms are thus endogenous; they do not cause behaviors but are the labels that we attach to behavior that results from other factors. Social Norms should be distinguished from behavioral regularities that emerge in cooperative relationships simply because they are value maximizing."

  HS: by `good type' is meant the person who refrains from anti-social behavior; a.k.a. the upstanding `law-abiding citizen' who does the `right thing' (even if no laws exist or if the force of law is absent.) For language policy, I see a parallel between social norming and the development of non-official, implicit, covert policy, behaviors related to language that are not determined by overt policy or language laws, etc. In other words, overt law-making (i.e. policy-making) alone does not necessarily account for behavior that reflects conformity to deeply-held belief systems about language; it is not necessary in order to have `law-abiding' citizens who follow state-sponsored ideas about language. Thus many Americans seem to think that English is the official language of our polity, and act accordingly. The French also act as if French has been officialized in many more domains than has actually been the case, or was the case before about 1992, when they decided to explicitly state policies that had been assumed to be legal, but were not.

  Similarly, people who do not accept the overt dictums (even if not juridically specific) about language are also part of the social-norming hypothesis; they reject the `good' norms and work against them. They're known in this system (derived from game theory) as the bad types. Linguistically, these would be the speakers who use non-standard forms, who code-switch between standard and non-standard, or between two non-standard languages.

• More from Posner 2000

  • Page 7, bottom. Five themes:

    1. Social norms are usefully understood as mere behavioral regularities with little explanatory power and little exogenous power to influence behavior.

    2. Many legal rules are best understood as efforts to harness the independent regulatory power of social norms.

       [In other words, if there are already operative social norms, laws validate them and work because the norms work, not vice-versa.]

    3. Some social norms contribute to social welfare, many social norms harm social welfare, and the value of norms is most a matter of historical accident.

       [I.e., not all social norms are `good' in their effect.]

    4. There is a tendency in the development of human affairs to legally reify the social norms that already exist, and complexify things, thus displacing the social norm(s) in question.

    5. `This displacement should not be deplored [...] but celebrated.'

  • Part I of the book develops a general model of monlegal cooperation based on wortk in game theory and economics spanning 4 decades, but now only entering the mainstream of economics and not having yet much impact on legal theory.

  • P. 33: ``What is important to understand for now is that the law can cause changes in the inferences that people draw about a person on the basis of his actions, and that this function of the law is very important though frequently overlooked."

  • Page 37: "Behavior changes as people send new signals and cooperate more or less; and beliefs change as people develop new associations between [about?] the behaviors that others engage in and the characters that they have."

  • Page 34: Social Norms describe the behavioral regularities that occur in equilibrium when people use signals to show that they belong to the good type. Social Norms are thus endogenous [i.e. they do not come from outside the group]; they do not cause behaviors but are the labels that we attach tobehavior that results from other factors. SN's should be distinguished from behavioral regularities that emerge in cooperative relationships simply because they are value maximizing.

  • P. 34-35: Traditions are SN's that have the sanction of time.

    The term Culture will also be used sometimes to capture these ideas [traditional behaviors?] though it implies less reliance on the past.

  • Confusing statement on pg. 36, which I cleared up by emailing Posner for an explanation: He says:

    1. Good types have low discount rates.

    2. Since it's hard to measure who are the good or bad types, except by their behavior, we use proxies, and the proxies for `bad types' and high [Posner mistakenly says 'low'] discount rates are poverty, crime, addiction, no savings, smoking, unsafe sex, less education, and younger [!] people. These are all bad types.

  • P. 37: An independent variable is the discount rate; the dependent variable is the measure of conformity to social norms. Conformity to social norms means that a person is signalling .

    But

    • signals could be arbitrary or culture-specific; or contradictory.

    • Some bad types signal other things, in opposition to the good types.

    • P. 38: Are these problems that can undermine rational choice theory? No: RC theory can be used to explain some social phenomena and not others.

    • P. 41-2: ``The behavioral regularity that results from [partial information (about the value of some activity or of character of people who do it) is described by a social norm, whereas behavioral regularities that arise because of coincidences in tastes, technologies, budget constraints or because of institutional competition (market prices) are mere behavioral regularities."

    • P. 71: Trustworthiness is defined as the propensity not to cheat in repeated prisoner's dilemmas. Or, a low discount rate. (Trustworthiness equals LDR? LDR is good; means the player trusts good outcomes in the future.)